As transgender people have increasingly come out to demand full participation in public life, they have spurred a movement to ensure the law protects them from discrimination. In America, that movement has touched on many issues including equal access to health care, education, employment, military service, and protection from hate crime. During the Obama administration, the United States federal government lent its support to that movement by prosecuting hate crime, interpreting laws prohibiting sex discrimination to include transgender people, and by fighting discriminatory state laws that purposefully singled out transgender people. Although the Trump administration has already acted to roll back federal support, the march toward legal recognition of transgender rights has momentum, and a definitive decision from the U.S. Supreme Court is likely in the very near future.

Corey Stoughton is a civil rights lawyer and strategy consultant based in London. Until January 2017, she was senior counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the United States Department of Justice under President Obama. Prior to joining government, Corey was a senior attorney at the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, were she led litigation and advocacy campaigns on issues involving racial and economic justice, criminal justice reform, national security and civil liberties, free speech, student’s rights, immigrants’ rights, and religious freedom. Corey has also been an adjunct clinical professor of law at New York University School of Law and a Fulbright Scholar studying legal aid reform measures in Turkey.

The event will take place at Mansfield College, in the Gilly Leventis Seminar Room, within the Institute and based in the new Hands Building (shown on the map as Love Lane building). Please report to the Lodge on arrival and ask for directions.